Crooked I

Kxng Crooked, aka Crooked I, first hit the upper reaches of the Billboard charts in the late 2000s as a member of Slaughterhouse, but the hard-nosed Long Beach rapper and label boss has a deeper history that includes a mid-'90s major-label solo contract, an affiliation with Death Row Records, and inclusion in XXL magazine's first annual Freshman Class feature. A case study in tenacity, Crooked has recorded several shelved projects and persevered through promising deals that didn't pan out. He has nonetheless built a body of work that includes a pair of studio albums with Slaughterhouse, a much larger number of additional collaborative projects, and a high stack of solo mixtapes and LPs. His post-Slaughterhouse output alone ranges from the charting debut solo album Apex Predator (2013) to the Joell Ortiz collaboration Rise & Fall of Slaughterhouse (2022).